RUTHFULLY YOURS

Future historians will find it ridiculous, but the response to a few hundred white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia will be the trigger for a realignment of American politics. Polite opinion, which includes Establishment political leaders, corporate CEOs, religious leaders of virtually all denominations, the universities and the press, abhor Donald Trump for his alleged moral equivalence between the Charlottesville neo-Nazis and the demonstrators who opposed them. Trump did no such thing, but he did something less pardonable altogether: He split the country along the fracture line of political correctness.

We are in terra incognita for American politics, and predictions are unreliable especially when they concern the future. Nonetheless I believe that the storm of opprobrium that broke upon Donald Trump this week will dissipate, and when the dust settles, the United States will have a different political alignment. Trump’s populism will split both the Republican and Democratic parties, with consequences we can barely begin to imagine. Waving the bloody shirt of Charlottesville will have unintended consequences. I do not know what the president was thinking, but I think his seemingly spontaneous wrangle with the press at his August 15 New York press conference was carefully gauged.

The economic and social condition of African Americans deteriorated sharply under the Obama Administration, and future prospects are grim. Black political leaders have been unable to suggest practical solutions, and instead propose symbolic ones, for example, destroying monuments to the defeated Confederacy of slave-holding states. In fact, black Americans want to keep the monuments to their old oppressors, by a margin of 44%-40% in a recent poll (white Americans want to keep them by a margin of 65%-25%). Although black leaders from the Congressional Black Caucus to the radical Black Lives Matter movement have made the Confederate monuments a wedge issue, there is no enthusiasm for Taliban tactics against relics of American history.

What Trump actually said in his contentious August 15 press conference is that a lot of “good people” wanted to preserve Confederate statues, a point he reiterated in subsequent social media statements. While he denounced the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, who numbered no more than 500 and got the worst of it from armed-and-armored counter-demonstrators, he indicated his sympathy with the citizens of Charlottesville who opposed their City Council’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. In other words, Trump took a position that Americans support by a roughly two-to-one majority. Trump observed that founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson also were slave-owners: should their monuments be toppled like Robert E. Lee’s? “Where do you stop?,” he asked the press corps.

Trump violated the Prime Directive of Political Correctness, namely, to accept the most extreme demands of aggrieved minorities as the norm, and to identify any opposition to these demands with the worst sort of extremists. Black Americans are in anguish, and their prospects are deteriorating. Seventy-three percent of black children will be raised without a father in the home, already a handicap. Although American universities admit black students at roughly the same rate as white students, only 40% of black male students graduate within four years of matriculation. The gap between black and white wages has widened from 18% in 1979 to 27% in 2015, probably because high-paying jobs available to blacks have disappeared, mainly in manufacturing. The fragile condition of black families and the low graduation rate for black male university students set a downward trajectory.

McCarthyism accusations are the last refuge of old Commies. As a dog returns to its vomit, old lefties reach for the security blanket of that ancient slur which is used to tar anyone who questions the left.

Once upon a time, Ron Radosh disavowed the left and its accusations of McCarthyism. But he now accuses a growing list of conservatives from David Horowitz to Stephen Bannon to Rich Higgins to Stephen Miller to a fellow named Daniel Greenfield of that primal sin of the left: McCarthyism.

McCarthyism is everywhere and in everyone. Except Ron Radosh, who was once accused of McCarthyism for breaking with the left, but has learned nothing from the experience.

That has always been the great irony of McCarthyism. It’s the lefties who were really guilty of the mindset that the slur represents. But it’s a particular irony now as posters pop up depicting President Trump in a Russian fur hat with a sickle and hammer. And Democrats accuse him of taking orders from Moscow. The lefties who claimed to be the victims of McCarthyism have become its perpetrators.

Rep. Ted Lieu accuses President Trump of taking orders from Vladimir Putin and walks around wearing a ‘Trump-Putin ‘16’ cap. Rep. Maxine Waters rants mindlessly about the “Kremlin Klan” on MSNBC. Rep. Quigley claimed on CNN that “when you meet with any Russians”, you’re meeting with Putin.

And Ron Radosh has nothing to say about this runaway leftist McCarthyism come to life.

Instead he has contributed to it by repeatedly trying to associate Stephen Bannon with Vladimir Lenin. Even as he accuses Trump supporters of McCarthyism, he also charges Bannon with Leninism.

There’s an illustration of Vladimir peering over Bannon’s shoulder while President Trump applauds in the article where Radosh first made the bizarre claim that Bannon, the former Breitbart boss and Trump strategist, had told him he was a Leninist. The claim was implausible and there was no evidence of it, but suddenly he was the talk of Morning Joe and showing up in the New Yorker. There were positive mentions in the New York Times. And even the Guardian and the New Statesman seemed forgiving.

It’s amazing what a little “McCarthyism” will do for your career.

That was Radosh’s first Daily Beast article. And also the last one that anyone paid attention to. In February, a desperate Radosh tried to dust off his Lenin smear by accusing Bannon of a “shout-out to a left-wing terror group”. By that he meant that Bannon had quoted Bob Dylan. “It doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.”

Radosh had actually created the kind of cartoonish McCarthyism that leftists imagined it to be in which quoting Dylan means that “Bannon is consciously revealing that he sees the Tea Party as the equivalent of a new revolutionary movement, that will play the same role as did the Weather Underground.”

McCarthy wept. So did Kafka and Orwell.

There’s a sad, comic absurdity in Radosh trying to stuff his old anti-Communism into Never Trumper garb and then peddle it to the media left. There’s only so many times you can accuse Bannon of being a secret Leninist. Once will get you discussed on Morning Joe. Twice is just tacky. And even a left that will swallow nearly any accusation about Trump has to roll its eyes at the Bannon-Dylan conspiracy.

Radosh’s dilemma is the classic problem of the Never Trumper. Beyond the cocktail party circuit, the only people who will listen are on the left. And his plight is especially sad. How do you sell Never Trump anti-Communism to the media left that hates Trump, but celebrates Communism?

In fewer than seven days after the Charlottesville violence last weekend, statuary and other symbols of the American Confederacy are disappearing. Others are being vandalized—someone in Washington on Tuesday, perhaps a Middlebury history major, even spray-painted an expletive on the memorial to Abraham Lincoln.

Standing at the center of this tumult is President Trump, who in a succession of statements and tweets since Saturday has tried to make himself understood on the status of Confederate statues and the people who wish to preserve them. Suffice to say, it hasn’t gone well.

The practical political lesson is that there are good reasons why U.S. Presidents and the people who work for them try to choose their words carefully when commenting on public events. Myriad political forces—some active, some dormant—sit beneath America’s political life, and what a President says can put those forces powerfully, even dangerously, in motion.

Absent Mr. Trump’s comments, it is doubtful that the counter-Confederate movement would have extended to the attempted renaming in Austin of Robert E. Lee Road or that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo would be demanding, as a “stand against intolerance and racism,” that the U.S. Army rename two streets at Fort Hamilton in southwest Brooklyn commemorating Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

In our view cities can properly decide whether they wish to take down Confederate symbols, many of which arose in the Jim Crow years of white supremacy in the early 20th Century. But erasing a nation’s history is a bad idea. Mr. Trump is being ridiculed for suggesting that George Washington or Thomas Jefferson could be next because they were slaveholders.

We’re glad to have the clarifications on the false equivalence between Confederate generals and the Founding Fathers, but we hope these clarifiers will be around when campus demonstrators or even historians start demanding that the Founders’ legacies be repudiated because they owned slaves.

“Racist” is a powerful accusation to make against anyone, but it is heard today in an ever-widening set of circumstances, not just against Confederate generals. It might be useful if more people understood the role race has played in American history, as well as that history’s effort to get past discrimination based on race.

It might begin with Jefferson and Washington, who wrote the language and built the institutions of the bedrock American belief that “all men are created equal” and possess inalienable rights. Those words planted the seeds of freedom for the slaves, an idea that advanced through the awful Civil War and, not without setbacks, for a century after, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

That is a long and difficult history of progress, one that deserves to be known in its complexity, rather than not known or forgotten. Robert E. Lee spent the rest of his life after the Civil War, notably as president of what became Washington and Lee University, trying to heal the wounds between north and south.

That’s at least one legacy of Lee we can all celebrate because we can’t see much purpose beyond political symbolism in reopening the Civil War 152 years later. It won’t educate an inner-city child trapped in a rotten school, it won’t create more economic opportunity, and it won’t lead to more racial tolerance.

I’m a descendant of a soldier who served under Gen. Robert E. Lee and a resident of the Richmond metro area, where one can take very few paces without bumping into a reminder of the Confederate past. Yet I can’t work up much enthusiasm about Civil War monuments.

My lackadaisical attitude has nothing to do with race or heritage and is quite widespread. Most people are far too busy worrying about losing their house, finding a job, making payroll and wondering why their dog’s tongue is turning blue to spend much time contemplating statues of guys who lost a war 152 years ago.

Carting away Baltimore’s Lee and Jackson statues in the wee hours, Aug. 16. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The violence in Charlottesville last weekend is deeply distressing. In this neck of the woods it’s commonly held that thugs who run down people with cars should go to the crocodile pit (after a fair trial, of course). But it’s hard not to cringe over the way a growing list of American locales are responding to the rise of the dead confederates.

In Baltimore, four monuments were purged Tuesday night in a scene reminiscent of the nocturnal vamoose of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in 1984. (By contrast, three of the statues were parked at a wastewater treatment plant.) You didn’t have to be a soldier, or even a rebel, to get the hook: A statue of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the Marylander who wrote the Dred decision and served on the U.S. Supreme Court until his death in 1864, was hauled off, along with a statue dedicated to Confederate women. Lexington, Ky., plans its own official purge, while a Confederate statue in Durham, N.C., was toppled Monday and kicked by protesters after it bit the dust.

Where will it stop? President Trump was widely mocked for saying Tuesday: “I wonder is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” He didn’t have to wait that long. The next day, a Chicago pastor demanded the removal of a Washington statue from a city park. Last October activists gathered outside New York’s American Museum of Natural History to demand the removal of a statue of “racist” Teddy Roosevelt. The Rough Rider still stands, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted Wednesday that “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the [City University] hall of great Americans because New York stands against racism.” CONTINUE AT SITE